The number of non-Taiwanese spouses settling down in this country has increased and foreign wives tend to have a lower level of education and are younger to marry on average than local wives, an official report released yesterday indicated.
The report was presented by and commented upon by Minister of the Interior Yu Cheng-hsien (余政憲) at the Cabinet's weekly meeting yesterday morning. The ministry tailored the survey to identify the needs of welfare programs for non-Taiwanese spouses.
"As of December, a total of 247,966 foreign citizens, composed of 148,098 Chinese nationals and 87,392 other-nationality wives have married Taiwanese and reside on the island," Yu revealed.
The report found that the percentage of newborns mothered by non-Taiwanese has doubled between 1998 and 2002.
Last year, a number of 30,833 citizens, or 12.46 percent of the all newborn babies in this country, were born by their foreign mothers, including women from China, Hong Kong, Macau and other foreign countries, whereas in 1998 only 5.12 percent, or 13,904 persons, were born by non-Taiwanese mothers, according to the minister.
The highest level of eduction obtained by about 40 percent of the foreign wives, either Chinese or other foreign nationals, was junior-high-school level or below compared to 29 percent among Taiwanese wives, the report showed.
The survey meanwhile noted that a significant number of these non-Taiwanese wives married when they were younger than 24 years old.
An overall percentage of 72 among the non-Chinese foreign wives married before aged 24, the report said, adding that up to 30 percent of them married their Taiwanese husbands before the age of 19.
The minister, during the presentation, unveiled working guidelines for improving the non-Taiwanese spouses' well being.
"The welfare policy should be implemented in six ways: to set up consultation services to help foreign spouses get used to life in this country; to provide health services; to safeguard labor rights; to help them upgrade their levels of education and cultural understanding; to protect their personal security and to offer complete legal protection for all non-Taiwanese spouses," he said.
Yu meanwhile proposed a governmental budgetary increase in order to carry out an all-out welfare policy to the foreign mates.
Official statistics about the divorce rate, the crime rate and the prevalence of domestic violence related to non-Taiwanese spouses should be filed to give future policy makers more background information, the minister advised.
Educating members of society to treat foreign spouses equally is important, too, Yu said. He said that the attainment would help Taiwan improve its human rights image.
The minister voiced his desire to establish to a new government agency in charge of monitoring illegal scams carried out in the name of multi-national marriages.
An essay competition jointly organized by a local writing society and a publisher affiliated with the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) might have contravened the Act Governing Relations Between the People of the Taiwan Area and the Mainland Area (臺灣地區與大陸地區人民關係條例), the Mainland Affairs Council (MAC) said on Thursday. “In this case, the partner organization is clearly an agency under the CCP’s Fujian Provincial Committee,” MAC Deputy Minister and spokesperson Liang Wen-chieh (梁文傑) said at a news briefing in Taipei. “It also involves bringing Taiwanese students to China with all-expenses-paid arrangements to attend award ceremonies and camps,” Liang said. Those two “characteristics” are typically sufficient
A magnitude 5.9 earthquake that struck about 33km off the coast of Hualien City was the "main shock" in a series of quakes in the area, with aftershocks expected over the next three days, the Central Weather Administration (CWA) said yesterday. Prior to the magnitude 5.9 quake shaking most of Taiwan at 6:53pm yesterday, six other earthquakes stronger than a magnitude of 4, starting with a magnitude 5.5 quake at 6:09pm, occurred in the area. CWA Seismological Center Director Wu Chien-fu (吳健富) confirmed that the quakes were all part of the same series and that the magnitude 5.5 temblor was
The brilliant blue waters, thick foliage and bucolic atmosphere on this seemingly idyllic archipelago deep in the Pacific Ocean belie the key role it now plays in a titanic geopolitical struggle. Palau is again on the front line as China, and the US and its allies prepare their forces in an intensifying contest for control over the Asia-Pacific region. The democratic nation of just 17,000 people hosts US-controlled airstrips and soon-to-be-completed radar installations that the US military describes as “critical” to monitoring vast swathes of water and airspace. It is also a key piece of the second island chain, a string of
The Central Weather Administration has issued a heat alert for southeastern Taiwan, warning of temperatures as high as 36°C today, while alerting some coastal areas of strong winds later in the day. Kaohsiung’s Neimen District (內門) and Pingtung County’s Neipu Township (內埔) are under an orange heat alert, which warns of temperatures as high as 36°C for three consecutive days, the CWA said, citing southwest winds. The heat would also extend to Tainan’s Nansi (楠西) and Yujing (玉井) districts, as well as Pingtung’s Gaoshu (高樹), Yanpu (鹽埔) and Majia (瑪家) townships, it said, forecasting highs of up to 36°C in those areas
RSS